The prospect of Netanyahu becoming Israel's president is regarded as problematic by the country's media, primarily because that position should be filled by a person with a stainless reputation, not by somebody who has been indicted in a series of graft probes.

In July, Israel's President Reuven Rivlin will vacate his post and the members of the Israeli parliament will need to elect a new head of state, who will man the position for the next seven years.

According to Israeli law, anyone who is a citizen and resident of Israel can become the country's president and now reports suggest that one of the people eyeing that position is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.

In Israel, where the presidency is merely symbolic and where the President serves as a role model, allegations that Netanyahu might end up taking the top post have stirred criticism and harsh reactions from the general public.

The reason for this is Netanyahu's ongoing legal battles.

Ukrainian energy executives and Kiev's national security officials launched a coordinated lobbying campaign in Washington that put the US on a collision course with EU countries over a new gas pipeline.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday how spin doctors working for Kiev-based Naftogaz and at least one representative of Ukraine's National Security Council pressed for four years to influence White House officials to oppose the Nord Stream 2 project.

According to the newspaper, they relied on close relations with so-called "Russia-skeptics" in Congress, such as Texas Senator Ted Cruz, to propose a package of sanctions on European companies involved in laying the Baltic Sea pipeline.

After Washington warned it would target construction and shipping firms involved in the project, which are mainly based in Germany and Denmark, Naftogaz's Vadim Glamazdin is said to have claimed that it would be "the final nail in the coffin." "When these sanctions are finally voted and become law, there will be no practical way to build this pipeline."

On Saturday it was reported that construction would resume on Nord Stream 2 this week, after a number of companies pulled out of the project last year in response to US threats of legal action. The 764-mile (1,229km) underwater pipeline will be among the longest in the world, linking Siberia's natural gas fields to the German port of Greifswald and more than 150 companies involved in its construction have been earmarked for punitive measures.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro — who sometimes has embraced the label "Trump of the Tropics" — said Sunday he'll wait a little longer before recognizing the U.S. election victory of Joe Biden.

Speaking to reporters while casting a ballot in municipal races, he also echoed President Donald Trump's allegations of irregularities in the U.S. vote.

"I have my sources of information that there really was a lot of fraud there," he said. "Nobody talks about that. If it was enough to define (victory) for one or the other, I don't know."

Asked if he would recognize Biden's victory, he said, "I am holding back a little more."

He also expressed doubts about Brazil's current electronic voting system, which he has suggested is vulnerable to fraud. He has urged the country to go back to a paper ballot system for the 2022 presidential election.

The conservative Brazilian leader has appealed to the same sort of right-wing populist base in Brazil that Trump has courted in the United States, and has welcomed comparisons to the U.S. president.

Like Trump, he has embraced unproven treatments for the new coronavirus and has campaigned to ease restrictions meant to combat it, arguing the economic loss is more damaging than the illness itself.

The Trump campaign has accused Democrat Party officials in half a dozen battleground states of widespread election fraud, mostly involving mail-in ballots. Democrats, most legacy media, and even some Republicans have dismissed the allegations and urged the President to concede defeat.

President Donald Trump has accused the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation of possibly being 'in on' the alleged plot to steal the election from him.

"This is total fraud and how the FBI and the Department of Justice, I don't know, maybe they're involved, but how people are allowed to get away with this stuff is unbelievable. This election was rigged. This election was a total fraud," Trump alleged, speaking to Fox News in a telephone interview Sunday morning.

Foreign policy dissidents have the greatest interest in repealing the Logan Act, not wielding it as a weapon to shield ex-CIA Directors while heralding it as a clearly defined criminal statute.

The right to dissent from, and to work against, the official foreign policy of the U.S. Government is vital: foundational to Constitutional liberties. There is very little such dissent in the U.S. Congress, where many of the core tenets of the Foreign Policy Community (from CIA drone warfare and clandestine coups to steadfast support for Gulf State and Middle East tyrannies as well as Israel) enjoy overwhelming, at times virtually unanimous, bipartisan support.

That is one of the reasons that — as I've said repeatedly — I am glad that there are now members of Congress such as Congresswomen Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan who so vocally and unflinchingly dissent from this general foreign policy orientation and especially from those policies which most members of Congress either cannot or do not want to denounce.

A buried lede in Judge Timothy C. Batten's order released late last night from an Atlantic District Court describes Georgia state lawyers - ostensibly acting on behalf of the public via the local government - defending Dominion Voting Systems' "trade secrets".

The court ordered that voting software and information contained therein should not be destroyed, or erased or altered in Cobb, Gwinnett, and Cherokee Counties.

But the order also revealed:

"Defendants' counsel also argued that allowing such forensic inspections would pose substantial security and proprietary/trade secret risks to Defendants."

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The bizarre nature of government lawyers defending a private, foreign company's "trade secrets" instead of attempting to secure the vote of the American public will raise further questions about the company's involvement in U.S. voting systems.

The term "trade secret" is used no fewer than NINE times in the contract between Georgia and Dominion Voting Systems.

The French parliament has dropped a controversial bill that would have curbed the right to film police officers in action, the speaker of parliament and leader of President Emmanuel Macron's ruling party announced on Monday.

"The bill will be completely rewritten and a new version will be submitted," Christophe Castaner, head of Macron's LREM (La République en marche) party told a news conference.


The draft bill had prompted protests across the country called by press freedom advocates and civil rights campaigners. Tens of thousands of people marched Saturday in Paris calling for the government to drop the measure, including families and friends of people killed by police.

Democrats planned to "ram all this [left-wing] policy down their throats" until Republicans won unexpected House victories in the November election, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday.

The Times quoted Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA):

"People were talking in a really cocky way before that Democrats were going to take the trifecta [White House, Senate and House], and we were not ever going to talk to Republicans about anything. We were going to ram all this policy down their throats," said Rep. Scott Peters (D-San Diego), a moderate.

Ambitious liberal policies like Medicare for all and the Green New Deal are likely to be pushed to a back burner, though Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and other progressives have signaled they will continue to advocate for their movement.

Pelosi (D-San Francisco) had said before the election that Democrats would expand the Affordable Care Act by using a special procedure in the Senate that required only 50 votes, but it's unclear now she will have even that.

According to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), one of the House impeachment managers who tried to have President Donald Trump removed from office earlier this year, Democrats were told "Republicans had only a 25% chance of keeping the Senate and that Democrats would pick up seats" in the House.

Imagine this: you wake up to the blaring of your alarm clock and immediately reach for your smartphone to scroll your Insta feed before getting out of bed. But instead of the usual delightful and informative Instagram posts, today you're greeted by a "server not found" error.

Deciding that it's too early in the morning to deal with this, you hop in the shower . . . but for some reason Alexa won't play your Spotify playlist through your bathroom smart speakers. You have to shower in silence like a luddite.

Getting frustrated, you head downstairs for breakfast. You prop your iPad up next to you and go to check your email while stuffing your face with your morning bowl of Cheeri-GMOs (now with extra HFCS!) but you're not getting any new messages. You turn on your smart TV and navigate to YouTube so you can catch up on all the latest news from MSNBC, but all you get is the never ending spiral of the spinning "loading" wheel.

Twitter? Down.

Facebook? No luck.

Reddit? Forget it!

Increasingly desperate, you try in vain to remember how to turn on your regular terrestrial TV. Then you recall you have something collecting dust in a closet somewhere: a radio. You turn it on, fumble with the dial, and find a station just in time to hear the announcement:

". . . is claiming responsibility for the outage. Once again, widespread outages across a range of internet services is sweeping the globe this morning, as a shadowy new terror group emerges to take responsibility . . ."

Suddenly, your phone starts making a strange sound. You don't know what it's doing at first, until you realize it's ringing. One of your friends is calling you. On the phone. Not texting, tweeting, messaging or snapchatting. Actually calling you.

There are landslides and then there are landslides. There are lopsided votes and then there are lopsided votes. There are egregious examples of vote manipulation and then there are really egregious examples of vote manipulation. What surfaced during hearings in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 25, 2020 may set the standard for electoral outrageousness. An expert testifying to the Pennsylvania Senate flagged a batch of ballots that recorded some 570,000 votes for Joe Biden and only 3,200 for Donald Trump.

Yes, you read that correctly. That would equate to Joe Biden bagging 99.4% of that enormous chunk of votes. That one batch alone would have flipped the state to Biden.

This bombshell was dropped last Wednesday at the Wyndham Hotel in Gettysburg. The November 25 hearings, which began at 12:30 p.m. and ran for nearly four hours, were convened at the request of Senator Doug Mastriano (R-Adams, Cumberland, Franklin, and York counties). It was sponsored by the Senate Majority Policy Committee, chaired by Sen. David Argall (R-Berks/Schuylkill). Mastriano has called what happened "unacceptable," and has called for the resignation of Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar.

This particular gem was provided by Ret. Col. Phil Waldren, a former combat officer with a background in Army information and electronic warfare. Waldren, who testified along with Rudy Giuliani's team, brought to the hearing his considerable expertise in analysis of election-data fraud.